Nick Holonyak, Jr.

Nick Holonyak, Jr., (born November 3, 1928, Zeigler, Illinois, U.S.), American engineer who was known for his pioneering work with light-emitting diodes (LEDs), notably creating the first visible LED.

Holonyak was the son of immigrants from what is now Ukraine. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he received B.S. (1950), M.S. (1951), and Ph.D. (1954) degrees. He was the first graduate student of two-time Nobel Prize recipient John Bardeen, a joint inventor of the transistor.

After Holonyak spent a year (1954–55) working at Bell Telephone Laboratories and two years (1955–57) in the military, he joined the General Electric (GE) electronics laboratory in Syracuse, New York. Several GE teams were working in the field of optoelectronics, the conversion of electric current into light. GE colleague Robert N. Hall had developed a laser using a semiconductordiode (a semiconductor device with positive and negative electrodes that can serve as a rectifier—that is, a converter of alternating current to direct current). Hall’s laser emitted only infrared radiation, which lies beyond the range of human vision. Holonyak decided to make a diode device that would emit visible light. By using the semiconductor material gallium arsenide phosphide (GaAsP) and the technique of stimulated emission, in 1962 Holonyak succeeded in operating the first practical visible LED device. Holonyak’s device emitted red light. After LEDs that produce green and blue light were developed (in the 1970s and ’90s, respectively), LEDs that emit white light became possible, revolutionizing the lighting industry. Among his other work for GE, in 1959 Holonyak was the first to make silicon tunnel diodes and the first to observe phonon-assisted tunneling.

In 1963 Holonyak left GE to take up a professorship at the University of Illinois, where in 1993 he was named to the John Bardeen Endowed Chair in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Physics. At Illinois, Holonyak pioneered the use of a number of alloys in diodes, and in 1977 he and a student made the first quantum-well laser diode. Holonyak retired as professor emeritus in 2013.

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